Turk Warns of a Religious War in Azerbaijan

By ALAN COWELL

Published: March 12, 1992

ANKARA, Turkey, March 11—
Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel pledged today to resist pressures for Turkish military involvement in the conflict between neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan and urged Western nations to avoid actions that could turn the fighting into a religious war between Christians and Muslims.

"We will help but we don't want the military involved," Mr. Demirel said. "We want a political solution." The fighting involves the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, and pits the Azerbaijanis, who are Muslims of Turkic descent, against the Christian Armenians, whose relations with the Turks have long been strained.

The Prime Minister's comments, in an interview in his office here, reflects the Turkish Government's efforts at avoiding direct embroilment in the conflict. Reports of massacres of Azerbaijanis by Armenians have fueled Turkish anger over the dispute, and some of Mr. Demirel's own followers want Turkey to take a tougher line against Armenia. There have been demonstrations in Ankara and other cities over the past week urging Turkish military support for the Azerbaijanis, but the Prime Minister dismissed their demands.

"This is a free country," Mr. Demirel said. "In the United States, just in front of the White House there are demonstrations every day. I don't think the White House is run by the street and we are not going to be run by the street."

Diplomats here say Mr. Demirel's fear is that the conflict could draw Western support for Armenia, leaving Turkey, a NATO member and staunchly pro-Western nation, tacitly aligned with Azerbaijan against Ankara's traditional allies.

"It should be evenhanded," Mr. Demirel said, referring to efforts to end the fighting. "We have told the West that it shouldn't give support to Armenia. It should not turn out to be a Christian-Muslim war and everybody should be very careful.

"We are looking for a cease-fire," he said. "It is not only our concern. It's a concern of many countries."

While the war over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh continues, Turkey is facing a war within its own borders against insurgents from the Kurdish Workers Party, an outlawed guerrilla movement fighting to establish a separate Kurdish state among Turkey's large Kurdish minority.

For the third time this month, Turkish warplanes struck across the border at suspected guerrilla camps in northern Iraq on Monday. In the first strikes last week, both the United Nations Children Fund and independent reporters said warplanes had killed civilians.

Mr. Demirel exonerated Turkish pilots, saying an investigation of the charges had proved that they had not struck civilian targets. "We have made investigations," he said. "Our security forces have been very careful."

Over the last year, Turkey has slightly relaxed its policies towards the Kurdish minority of some 10 million, permitting them for the first time to speak their language openly and permitting Kurdish deputies to enter the 450-seat Parliament, albeit on another party's ticket.

Those modest concessions have contributed to a sense among some Kurds that the guerrilla campaign will eventually prod the authorities toward a negotiation on Kurdish demands for some form of autonomous status.

But the Turkish leader offered a particularly blunt rebuttal of those suggestions today. "I don't think it would be possible at all" to negotiate with the guerrilla group, Mr. Demirel said.

"The P.K.K. is a group of killers," he said, referring to the Kurdish Workers Party by its Turkish initials. "How can a state negotiate with killers?"

While Kurds should be shown full respect for human rights and their constitutional status as "first-class citizens," Mr. Demirel said, "I do not think there should be a political solution" to the Kurdish dispute.

"I do not think people who call themselves Kurdish should be any different from any other people," he said, adding there would remain "one official language, one flag, one state and one country in Turkey. The Turkish state is unitary."